SARVEN
One moment, she is here.
She is reaching for me. Her scent fills my lungs: dust, water-sweat, and the lingering, sweet musk of her release. She is warm. She is breathing. She is mine.
The next beat of my dra-kir, she is gone.
It happens in a nightmare silence.
The slip. The way her eyes widen in shock as the rock betrays her.
The whisper of her digits brushing my arm.
Then nothing.
She hits the water with a crack that sounds like broken stone.
White spray rises, mixed with the red froth of the fake blood. Then the pool swallows her, the surface smoothing over as if she was never there.
She does not come back up.
The current grabs her at once, a hungry pull under the surface. I see the brief ghost of her form twist beneath the red haze, then vanish toward the black throat of the outflow.
My dra-kir seizes.
No.
The word rips through me, louder than the roar of the water.
NO.
I launch myself from the ledge, a lunge into the empty air where she used to be. And in that split second of suspension, between the rock and the water, something inside me snaps.
I don’t choose to let go.
It takes me.
Light explodes out of me mid-air.
Not a flare. Not the little surges I have been wrestling down.
An eruption.
Golden fire tears through my veins, blinding and merciless. It scorches outward from my center, pouring from my eyes, my mouth, the pores of my skin.
And with the light comes the pain.
It slams into my pelvis, a hot, cleaving blow that almost folds me in half. Like being pierced by a blade made of molten stone carving me open.
The thick skin that has sealed and hidden my member all my life splits without warning. Tears. Rends.
The pressure that has been building for sols, the ache that has gnawed at me since we entered these tunnels, finally has somewhere to go.
Something heavy and throbbing drops inside me, forcing its way down and out through newly opened flesh.
It is agony.
It is ecstasy.
